The Origins of Civilization in Greek and Roman Thought (Routledge Revivals) by Sue Blundell

Author:Sue Blundell [Blundell, Sue]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Ancient, General, Greece, Philosophy, History & Surveys, Ancient & Classical, Political
ISBN: 9781317751106
Google: 6XaFCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-02-05T01:26:34+00:00

We do not know enough about earlier Presocratic cyclical theories to say whether this distinction should lead us to prefer one interpretation over another. I think it would be true to say that if Empedocles did believe in B, then it would be the first definite example of a ‘sudden catastrophe’ cycle. But Anaximander and Heraclitus remain imponderables. And in any case, Empedocles’ ‘sudden catastrophe’ would be one that destroyed a hypothetical sphere and not the perceptible world, which would distinguish it from all the theories that came after it as well as those that went before. When dealing with Empedocles, we should not dismiss a theory just because it appears to be unique.

Empedocles’ cosmic cycles may have been related to (possibly co-existent with) the cycles of the soul, but there is no direct evidence for this. What is more apparent is that there are probably cultural and moral values attached to the various stages of the cycle: these will be examined in the next chapter.

There is no shortage of cycles, both cosmic and cultural, in the works of Plato: they are mentioned in five of his dialogues. But all of the contexts are distinctly ‘mythological’, and it is impossible to know whether we should take them seriously. The cycles described in the Politicus have already been mentioned: these are cosmic and cultural in their implications, since at the point when God releases control of the world, it begins to revolve in the opposite direction, and is afflicted by catastrophes which wipe out most living creatures; and this reversal is accompanied by a marked falling-off in the cultural and moral standards of the few survivors. Equally fanciful is the disaster syndrome referred to in the Timaeus and taken up again in the Critias. In the former we are treated to a story ‘which though extraordinary is absolutely true’, passed on, we are assured, by the sixth century lawgiver Solon, who had heard it from Egyptian priests at the city of Sais on the delta. These priests had lectured Solon on how the Greeks were a people with a very short history, because in common with the majority of the human race their ancestors had been practically wiped out by one of the periodic catastrophes which beset the earth. The peculiar position of Egypt on the Nile had protected her from these, and consequently Egyptian temples had accumulated records of human civilisation going back much further than those of other nations. There had been many disastrous floods and fires (caused by a change in the orbit of the planets) in the history of the world, but the Greeks remembered only one of each (Deucalion and Phaeton). In every land apart from Egypt, people had only just begun to develop city-life and the art of writing when the waters or the flames got them again, and all records and most of the inhabitants were lost. But the Egyptians knew what the Greeks did not, that 9000 years ago, before the greatest of the floods, Athens had been a city valiant in war and with excellent laws (Timeaus 21B–23C).

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